Organizational Differences In Managerial Compensation And Financial Performance

This up-to-date, research-oriented textbook focuses on the relationship between compensation systems and firm overall performance. In contrast to more traditional compensation texts, it provides a strategic perspective to compensation administration rather than a functional viewpoint. The text emphasizes the role of managerial pay, its importance, determinants, and impact on organizations. It analyzes recent topics in executive compensation, such as pay in high technology firms, managerial risk taking, rewards in family companies, and the link between compensation and social responsibility and ethical issues, among others. The authors provide a thorough and comprehensive review of the vast literatures relevant to compensation and revisit debates grounded in different theoretical perspectives. They provide insights from disciplines as diverse as management, economics, sociology, and psychology, and amplify previous discussions with the latest empirical findings on compensation, its dynamics, and its contribution to firm overall performance.

This study explores the dynamic structure of the pay-for- performance relationship in CEO compensation and quantifies the effect of introducing a more complex model of firm financial performance on the estimated performance sensitivity of executive pay. The results suggest that current compensation responds to past performance outcomes, but that the effect decays considerably within two years. This contrasts sharply with models of infinitely persistent performance effects implicitly assumed in much of the empirical compensation literature. We find that both accounting and market performance measures influence compensation and that the salary and bonus component of pay as well as total compensation have become more sensitive to firm financial performance over the past two decades. There is no evidence that boards fail to penalize CEOs for poor financial performance or reward them disproportionately well for good performance. Finally, the data suggest that boards may discount extreme performance outcomes -both high and low - relative to performance that lies within some `normal' band in setting compensation.

Based on an insightful study of the methods employed by the most successful Fortune 100 companies, this pioneering book offers innovative strategies for creating employee compensation packages that any company can use to increase its competitiveness and achieve superior performance. Line drawings.